As the regular season winds down, coaches tell their players to just focus on the one game ahead of them. Don’t worry about conference championships or post-season games. All the while, the coaches have their heads on a constant rotation with game week prep, an eye on potential games down the road, recruiting, the transfer portal, and the NIL balance sheet. Having gained some and having lost some, Wake Forest’s Dave Clawson has answers for the broken system. We have heard coaches speak out about the portal or NIL every week. But take a minute or two to get into the granularity of the subject. You will realize the challenges are much more complex.
It doesn’t take much to get the 10th-year Wake head coach to opine about the state of affairs in college football. Spend time in his weekly press conferences, ask just the right questions, and make sure your recording device is on. One thing you can say about Clawson though is that he lives the discrepancies every day being at Wake Forest. This is not just Quixotic howling from a mountaintop. And where he calls out shortcomings, he often has thoughts on a viable solution. Ok, so there are two things you can say about him in this scenario.
Coaches Out
Clawson can see it on the other side of the field this week as well. The Demon Deacons face Syracuse in the regular season finale. The Orange just fired head coach Dino Babers, a friend of Clawson’s, after an eight-year run in upstate New York. Babers is the fourth head coach fired in the last two weeks. It used to be that schools waited until the season was over to make a change.
The December calendar has changed that in recent years. The transfer portal and the early signing period for high school recruits have led schools to shoot up flares across the country when they know they are going to make a change.
“As with so many things in college football right now, the tail is wagging the dog,” Clawson said Tuesday. He proceeded to go on about how the sport talks out of both sides of its mouth this time of year. Okay, it was somewhat Quixotic. “We don’t want players to opt out [end of season games or bowl games] yet athletic directors fire coaches with a month left in the season.”
No December to Remember
Part of the problem, according to Clawson, is that the December calendar that gets so much attention, certainly in this space. The conference championship games are the first weekend in December. The bowl announcements are on Sunday, December 3rd. The transfer portal opens on Monday, December 4th.
After that comes game prep if you make it to a bowl. And you do that all while trying to talk your players out of going into the portal, recruiting players who are in the portal, and some coaches actually still do some high school recruiting before the December 20-22 early signing period.
Clawson, who is on the board of trustees of the American Football Coaches Association, sees a need to reinvent the December calendar. “Maybe create a bigger gap [at the end of the regular season] before you start recruiting and go on the road,” he suggested. “But what happens now is because of when the transfer portal opens, because of when recruiting starts, because of when the early signing date is, if you wait until the end of the season [to replace a coach] you worry that you’re going to lose all your players because they have not met the new coach. And you’re going to lose all your recruits. And if you don’t make the move early, you’re going to fall further behind.”
Portal at the Expense of High School Recruits
He called it hypocritical that “we”, the college football universe, criticize players for announcing early that they are going into the transfer portal, (some have announced before the portal is even open). Or players get critiqued for sitting out games, particularly in the post-season. And yet coaches get shown the door with a month left in the season.
There are suggestions about what can and cannot be moved around in the calendar. When the portal opens on December 4th, it will be open for players to enter for 30 days. If a player is coming from a team that is still in post-season play, they have an extra five days beyond their last game. But that means it runs right over the high school players in the early signing period.
“The problem is that you have all these high school players that committed to schools, and they have been committed for six months, a year, 18 months. And then what happens is when the portal opens, if a coach then finds a player in the portal that he likes better than the high school player, they end up dumping these high school guys a week before signing day, because they found someone in the portal that’s better.”
Clawson went back to the “hypocritical” phrase when talking about the system. “If a player decommits, we’re all mad at him. But the amount of coaches right now that are dumping players that have been committed to them for six months, a year, or longer, because somebody suddenly became available in the portal…”
Flip the Calendar
The idea, from Clawson, would be to move the early signing period up, maybe a week in front of the portal window opening. In his mind, it would tighten the commitment to the high school players, and then use the portal to fill in the gaps.
Clawson says in his time at Wake they have never dropped a high school recruit like that. “But now not doing it almost puts you at a little bit of a disadvantage. But, again, we’re able to sleep at night.”
Of course, the transfer portal is a wide-open topic with regard to Wake Forest football, if not a wide-open option. When your team is 4-7 headed into the last week of the season, and the transitional season everyone expected showed little viable transition to the next upward path, looking at other player options is inevitable.
The Wake Forest Roadblock
Clawson made it clear that come Spring, there are going to be open competitions for some spots, even those manned by returning veterans. Quarterback is among them. All of that of course depends upon the personnel available.
Wake Forest is not a particularly inviting school when it comes to transfers, whether they be football players or the general student population. The approval process is lengthy, and the number of credits the school accepts from other schools is generally low-balled. All while the school drops in the US News and World Report rankings. Working on the process starting in December and getting them in by Spring camp can be an uphill battle. It is why he told us last week, his options are basically limited to players with less than two years at their current school, (where loss of credits won’t be so cumbersome), or grad transfers. They can get into Wake more easily but are essentially short-term rental players.
That flies in the face of the “multi-year development” of players that Clawson prefers. But it is the system he has to work with. He acknowledged Tuesday that the school’s NIL money from the collective has gone up since this time last year. In fact, it has about doubles, (he would not give specifics). But he added that it is still far below a competitive level when compared to other ACC schools.
Remember That Guy?
NIL, the portal, rental players, and competitive balance were front and center for Clawson last weekend as Wake Forest traveled to South Bend to play Notre Dame. There, right in front of him was Irish quarterback Sam Hartman, who had spent the previous five years under Clawson at Wake. And he was getting a senior day tribute on the jumbotron. “Here’s a guy that we recruited and we developed, and they’re putting a video on him saying ‘We will always love you,’” Clawson laughed. “You only dated him for a couple of months. It can’t be love. We’re the ones that love him. We had five years with him.” He added, “They bought him and rented him for a year and now they love him.”
Love in college football is fleeting at best.
